21.316 source of a half-remembered quotation?

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 316.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
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         Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:06:44 +0100
         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
         Subject: source of a half-remembered quotation?

I would be enormously grateful to anyone here for exact citation to
the author and work in which, I recall, a particularly
bizarre sorting of objects and phenomena is set out. I think the
author is the Taoist Chinese philosopher, Chuang-tzu (Zhuangzi), whom
I would have been reading in the Burton Watson translation. This
translation is now available in its entirely at
http://www.terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu.html, but unfortunately I
cannot remember exact words, and so the usual sort of searching has
proven ineffective. The passage is a long list of things that are
grouped together but which we would ordinarily not associate. I take
it to be a Taoist lesson in the arbitrariness of all taxonomies. Very
Pythonesque, actually.

Many thanks for any leads.

Yours,
WM

Willard McCarty | Professor of Humanities Computing | Centre for
Computing in the Humanities | King's College London |
http://staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/. Et sic in infinitum (Fludd 1617, p. 26).
Received on Fri Oct 26 2007 - 09:33:50 EDT